Today is MLK’s Birmingham Jail Letter Anniversary; Listen to a U.S. Senator on Birmingham Bombing

Today marks the 55th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written April 16, 1963. The letter outlined Dr. King’s response to clergymen across the country who had condemned his protesting actions as “unwise and untimely.” Dr. King wrote, “It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.”

This letter was one of the defining moments of the Birmingham Campaign, a peaceful and influential movement out of Birmingham, Alabama with the intention of desegregating the city.

The senator told Bold TV that it surprised him that “even after I guess it’s been almost 18 years now since we got the first conviction, 17 since the second one, is how still emotionally I am attached to those cases. I still, when I talk about the deaths of those girls, when I talk about the families, and what all it meant, I still get emotional about it. It is a story that has touched so many people and so many lives.”

Jones spoke to Bold TV about his motivations in writing the book.

“It’s a story of not just the movement and what all was happening, but it’s a story also of how we’ve changed as a people,” he said.

Birmingham was a pivotal moment in American history.

“When these kids died as a result of a Klan bombing, the shock waves reverberated around the world and I think it just woke the conscience — not just the legal aspects of segregation — it woke the conscience of America,” Jones said. “It certainly woke the conscience of a Congress and of a president who then started pushing for the Civil Rights Law that ultimately got enacted in 1964, and the voting rights act that ultimately got enacted in 1965.”